Looking back, it’s still hard to fathom. In late August, an Air Force bomber accidentally flew six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads from North Dakota to Louisiana — with the power of 60 Hiroshimas — and no one realized the nuclear-armed missiles were missing for more than a day.
The breathtaking incident raised questions about whether the flight was, in fact, an accident, or whether this might be part of some hyper-aggressive posturing towards the Middle East. How does a bomber inadvertently fly across the United States with six nuclear warheads? Was this human error? A bureaucratic mix-up? Or something more sinister?
The Washington Post has a detailed front-page analysis today of what transpired and concludes that this really was an accident. An incredibly serious, jaw-droppingly dangerous accident.
Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber.
The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane’s wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.
That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.
The episode, serious enough to trigger a rare “Bent Spear” nuclear incident report that raced through the chain of command to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and President Bush, provoked new questions inside and outside the Pentagon about the adequacy of U.S. nuclear weapons safeguards while the military’s attention and resources are devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You think?
This really is one of those keep-you-up-at-night kind of stories.
Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by The Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident. […]
“I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing,” retired Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, who served as U.S. Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998, said in an interview.
A simple error in a missile storage room led to missteps at every turn, as ground crews failed to notice the warheads, and as security teams and flight crew members failed to provide adequate oversight and check the cargo thoroughly. An elaborate nuclear safeguard system, nurtured during the Cold War and infused with rigorous accounting and command procedures, was utterly debased, the investigation’s early results show.
The incident came on the heels of multiple warnings — some of which went to the highest levels of the Bush administration, including the National Security Council — of security problems at Air Force installations where nuclear weapons are kept. The risks are not that warheads might be accidentally detonated, but that sloppy procedures could leave room for theft or damage to a warhead, disseminating its toxic nuclear materials.
Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-chairman of the House Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation, said a couple of weeks ago, “Nothing like this has ever been reported before, and we have been assured for decades that it was impossible. The complete breakdown of the Air Force command and control over enough nuclear weapons to destroy several cities has frightening implications not only for the Air Force, but for the security of our entire nuclear weapons stockpile.”
Apparently, this mistake was akin to pulling an inside straight. One former National Security Council staff member with detailed knowledge told the WaPo this was “a breakdown at a number of levels involving flight crew, munitions, storage and tracking procedures — faults that never were to line up on a single day.”
A former Air Force senior master sergeant described this was “one of the biggest mistakes in USAF history.” Is this an inopportune time to wonder if, perhaps, the president’s policies of stretching and over-burdening the military contributes to mistakes like these?